Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that split the atom before Ernest Rutherford could say pasghetti.
It’s been a hard week for us labouring under lovely praise for the new issue, but it’s been even more trying to witness a slew of wonderful pictures of it to boot. It was snapped right after being torn out of its packaging, before communing with the Lord and on its way to take to the skies. It was also adorning the shelves of the coolest new magazine shop on the south coast and it’s true home, Good News in Soho. A winner of the week, however, saw it pictured with a startlingly cute cat. Do keep them coming flying out of the traps towards editorial@the-fence.com. It makes our hearts sing and it will make one of you slightly drunker in the long run.
With wonderful images such as these, we’re sure all those unfortunate enough not to be subscribed to the magazine will be desperately trying to find the subscription page on our website. In our infinite generosity, we offer it in button form below.
The business of the week, then. We note the passing of a rich liar, cast an eye to Brazil and talk about something quite heavy. But first, a little politics.
Hello Rock, Hello Hard Place
It’s been hard to miss or even avoid the latest ricochet of events in the middle east into British politics. First was the Green Party’s motion that was passed that stated that Zionism is racism and called for the eventual replacement of Israel with a single Palestinian state with equal rights for all. Then came the Tories with their plans to build ‘essentially an Iron Dome’ but for Britain. The brief moment of clarity and support in a promising direction that came with Ed Milliband’s recent speech seems to be passing.
Is there important conversations to be had about the way in which forms of Zionism ( for those keen on specifics we’re thinking of Jabotinsky, Herzl and Territorialists as opposed to Ahad Ha’amists and writers like Isak Nachman) are rooted in racist thinking about all ‘Arabs’? Absolutely. Is there perhaps a conversation to be had about Britain’s ability to defend itself following the galling images of Michael Gove as our faux-PM in The Wargame? You betcha. Were either of these the reasoned and useful pronouncements we needed on these topics? It’s unconvincing to say the least.
But even without the politics, the optics of both parties remain truly terrible. Lots of Polanski’s photo and press ops come off as unbelievably cringy and pandering and the Conservatives seem to be rapidly descending into a strange British subculture soon to be recovered by an enterprising young journalist under the category of Weird Britain. Recent photos coming out of the Tory conference (the tapestry, bad DJ sets and insanely captioned items) mean the dark blue is leading the charge of rubbishness at the moment, but it truly is hard to pick a winner from the two.
Hate in Hampstead
Bron Maher has written many brilliant and often very fun dispatches for us over the years on LGBT+ topics. One of the funnest was probably ‘The Fuck Tree’ which is, for newer subscribers, an excellent read from the archive. Even when Bron tackled much more serious topics as he did in his feature ‘The Tina Triangle’, there was still a good deal of mirth to be found in the comings and goings of Lambeth’s busy chemsex scene.
But his most recent piece for us is not like that. Instead, Bron has focused on a recent homophobic hate crime that happened, almost unbelievably, in Hampstead. It is a sad but important read, revealing just how common this remains, what it does to those who experience it and how hard it is to get justice afterwards.
Keep It Short
Congratulations are in order for Luke Kennard, who has made it onto this years’ Booker Prize Shortlist with his fantastic satirical novel Black Bag. Now to be all like we knew him before he was on breakfast TV but, well, we did – his brilliant short story ‘Point and Click’ featured in Issue 15, and is online here for you to read at leisure.
Televangelina
The Fence was deeply gladdened to hear of the passing of televisual evangelist and our editors homophonic namesake Mr Jim Bakker. He was truly special in that world of bullshit artists, mostly because, after a highly publicised sex scandal, his work became increasingly deranged, even by televangelist standards.
And it is worth remembering those standards for a moment because televangelism is a scam that really should never have worked. The ‘Prosperity Gospel’ as it is known, simply asks for constant donations of cash (sowing seeds) to your choice of priest in return for god’s favour (bountiful harvest). That’s it. There’s not even the decency many scammers have of throwing out a few breadcrumbs to make it look like something’s legit before pulling the rug. Listening to one televangelist’s nephew blow the lid on the details of the whole thing is really quite something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmqdkLqjmx4
And for some time Bakker followed this classic plan, successfully raking in money and using his popularity to do some old-fashioned scammin’ too, such as selling exclusive membership to a club which got you access to hotels that hadn’t been built yet. But soon, he was found to have paid hush money to and allegedly raped a woman called Jessica Hahn, and was then convicted of accounting fraud and sent to prison. It was here that he later revealed in his book I Was Wrong that he first read the bible, having preached about it for decades without bothering. It’s also where things got weird. He completely rejected the prosperity gospel of old and became a full-on doomsdayer.
We cannot recommend highly enough this compilation of Jim trying to sell jumbo paint buckets of soup to survive the end times to his slightly confused looking followers, who are all gathered around in a kind of farmhouse trattoria set up. Something in his obviously forced enjoyment of bucket soup and his stage hands hurriedly bringing more food tubs to the fore is simply excellent viewing. For those who like jumping off the deep end there is a longer, creatively edited compilation of Mr Bakker’s work here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6uhZCB62k
For those with a more direct sense of humour, we also cannot bring up this topic without remembering one of the earliest internet memes, the farting preacher.
Tank You Next
You may know Andy Burnham as King of the North but at chez Fence we know our fledgling prime minister as King of Intermodal Bulk Transportation. In our first piece online from Issue 29 Daniel Marc Janes takes us through Burnham’s incongruous past stint as a staff writer at a logistics trade magazine in Brentford, where our future prime minister reported on ‘tank containers, intermediate bulk containers, rail tanks and the movement of bulk liquids’ and celebrated a good day with crisps from the local Esso.
In Case You Missed It
Another Tory handled exit goes horribly wrong.
Gideon Rachman loves powerful beasts.
Something for those of you who enjoyed our personals.
And Finally
Yesterday Brazil’s presidential race announced it was going into a second round, with Flávio Bolsonaro securing 47% percent of the vote to incumbent Luíz Inácio Lula’s 45.1%. The developments are the latest in a staggering, yet perhaps unsurprising, turn of events for the Bolsonaro clan, whose influence seems to have been barely impacted by the actions of their notorious patriarch over the last few years.
The Bolsonaro’s have wielded power in various guises in Brazil for years, culminating in Jair’s chaotic presidency, beset by corruption allegations (earning him ‘Person of the Year’ by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in 2020) as well as a catastrophic mishandling of Covid, or what the former leader referred to as a ‘little flu’. This eventually ended with him losing his re-election attempt in 2023, which in turn triggered a storming of federal government buildings and self-coup ultimately landed Bolsonaro with the 27-year jail sentence he is currently serving, despite his best efforts. Illusions that this would quash the Bolsonaro influence however are just that - during this recent run of elections, Bolsonaro’s son Carlo and wife Michelle won seats in the senate, while another son Jair Renan was elected to the lower house of congress. Flávio too looks to be on the brink of success, assuming he absorbs the migration of votes from the election’s other right-wing candidates. If Bolsonaro Jr does succeed, one of his first acts as president, he has assured voters, will be to pardon his father.
So, while the future is shaping up to be pretty bleak, we thought we would bring back this gem of a clip of Brazilian journalist Manuela Borges questioning Bolsonaro about his support for Brazil’s military dictatorship in 2014. Laughing as he dismissed her accusations of him being a ‘criminal’ contrast nicely with a news report from Borges in 2025, where she could not be joined but Bolsonaro, as he was then residing in the jail behind her, a fact she hammers home while pointing gleefully the federal facility. Bolsonaro’s personal motto, declared on X in 2016, is John 8:32 – ‘The truth will set you free’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-p7nlQmCes
Well there we are for this week, we do hope you enjoyed and we hope your next set of seven treats you sweetly. Do remember to pick up a subscription to the mag, this new issue really is a belter and not one to be missed.
If you need to contact us on any issues and support needs reach out on support@the-fence.com or editorial@the-fence.com if your main problem is that you want to be in the next edition. Otherwise, we’ll see you soon enough. The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was so loud it could be heard 3,000 miles away.
All the best,
TF